TURNBERRY, Scotland — Steve Marino got a kick out of playing links golf for the first time. Took right to it, in fact.
Playing in the final group of a major on the weekend for the first time? With Tom Watson, no less? Well, that was a little different.
Marino made it to the big stage for the first time in his fledgling career Saturday with a 67-68 start to his first British Open, but the nerves sure showed during a wild ride Saturday along the Scottish coast.
“It was a combination of the good, the bad and the ugly out there,” Marino moaned.
The 29-year-old went tumbling down the scoreboard in the first five holes, losing five strokes. He plugged his ball in the side of a hill, had to drop from an adjoining fairway and took triple bogey at No. 15. He missed a bunch of putts inside 10 feet, the sort of thing you just can’t do trying to win your first major championship.
But Marino also had an eagle, nearly made another and closed with a birdie-birdie finish that kept him on the fringe of contention, even as everyone else at Turnberry was toasting Watson, his 59-year-old playing partner in the last group and the improbable leader heading to the final round.
“Right now, I’m a little bit bummed out because I really hung in there in the middle of the round,” said Marino, who finished with a 6-over 76 that included only seven pars. “It’s amazing how fast you can let a pretty good round get away from you.”
He certainly deserves credit for hanging in there. His round started dismally — three straight bogeys beginning at No. 2, then a double bogey at the fifth when he drove his tee shot into a bunker, hit a poor approach that left him with a treacherous line above the hole, and wound up missing a short one after he finally got it down near the cup.
But two brilliant shots gave Marino a virtual tap-in for eagle at the par-5 seventh, and his first birdie of the round at No. 11 carried him within a stroke of Watson for the lead.
“I was going along so well, and all of a sudden it was like, bam!” Marino said. “Next thing you know, I was like 8-over for the round.”
Cricket, anyone?
Not often does a guy from Tasmania who has played eight previous majors, missed six of the cuts and never finished higher than 36th almost top a major leaderboard on Sunday morning.
But there’s Matthew Goggin, 35, from that Australian state, his last win on the Nationwide Tour, one shot behind Watson partly because his putting has improved after “years of hard work.”
As a lad, he might have opted for cricket, he said, but, “I was a bit scared of the ball, actually. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it whizzing up around my ears, so I tended to back away and slash over a point, which wasn’t a good thing to do in the high grades of cricket.”
No three-peat.
Padraig Harrington’s bid to become the first player in 53 years to win the British Open three times in a row virtually ended when he shot a 6-over 76 to fall 13 shots off the lead.
Winner of a playoff at Carnoustie in 2007 and a second title at Royal Birkdale by four shots last year, the 37-year-old Irishman was never in contention this time around. His error-ridden third round underlined his poor form coming into the championship.
Harrington recently has missed five cuts on the European and PGA tours, although he won a low-key tournament in Ireland before heading for Turnberry.
Harrington also won last year’s PGA Championship.
Denver Post wire services
